Feuer Foyer

Even if I’ll repeat myself several times with the word architecture, this is not at all a show about architecture. It is more about home. What a home is, how home started. As longing as belonging. It has to do with one of the fundamental philosophical questions of architecture. It goes against the primitive hut, it’s not the covering, but gathering. It is about fire, and how fire created the home. So it’s not anymore about the roof but about the relations. Everything that creates a ritual can be the starting point of a home. For political and ideological reasons it was argued that the house starts with the idea of covering. Humans need to shelter themselves from nature. So the link is humans against nature as one is not part of the other. In the ‘60s a new wave of thoughts started opposing this idea of the “primitive hut”. The house didn’t start as a cover from the rain, but as a grouping of life and rituals. Already Vitruvius thought that fire created ambient and that controlling the ambient created architecture. Even here, in the mountains, the houses were created around the fire (the hearth, one of the four elements of architecture as written by Gottfried Semper), but the fire is also the enemy. one needs walls of stone to avoid the burning of the external wood structure. This “barrier” becomes the first room, the central room is an altar to the fire. Going back several thousand years, an example is the painted cave. The cave is not a home, the painted cave is. Painted caves should not be looked at with modern lights, but with fire. The fire, with flickers and shadows, creates movement. The paintings start moving. So, in this moment, the mental space is projected in the cave. It is the mental space that creates the home. By extension, if the fire creates a space by changing its surroundings, so too does the cigarette. People gather together, often in circles, becoming walls protecting the central little fires.The bonfire creates an atmosphere, it allows to transcend space. Drugs do the same, and can become a home. Every device that allows you to live the space in a different way is a device of creation of space. It goes so far as to say that the wifi is a fire, managing human environment and its rituals. Rituals, and not shelter, become home.